if you thought the housing crisis was getting better in your neighborhood think again it's not over get ahead we'll tell you why the foreclosure problem is actually getting worse how the government is contributing to the problem. and he was one of the biggest critics of genetically modified foods now environmental activist mark linus is changing his tone arguing that g.m. foods are actually necessary for asking what changed his mind in just a minute. and from the days of its inception solitary confinement was meant as a tour to punish or break a person but there's tough tactics we use on people already deemed mentally

unstable one federal judge says no i'll tell you why. here it is monday january seventh eight pm in washington d.c. i'm christine and you're watching our t.v. well it's a new year and there are some new nominees for some top positions to help meet the challenges of our time i'm proud to announce my choice for two key members of my national security chuck hagel for secretary of defense and john brennan for director of the central intelligence agency chuck hagel is the leader that our troops deserve. chuck hagel is a former republican senator of nebraska also a vietnam veteran with two purple hearts but his nomination is making some waves and he's expected to receive

a barrage of harsh questions on several issues during the nomination process now there's a few back in two thousand and two despite voting in favor of allowing the united states to invade iraq then senator hagel listed several reasons why it was a bad idea even predicting many things that could go wrong many view that anti interventionist stance is unpatriotic even still today but perhaps the biggest controversy stems from a position he holds that can be summed up by something he said back in two thousand and six he said that he's a united states senator not an israeli center senator he said he supports israel but his first interest is to take an oath of office to the constitution of the united states not to a president not to a party not to israel he said if i go run for senate in israel i'll do that now critics have called a statement an insulting anti jewish floor and over the weekend several republican lawmakers went on the record with their concern of the prospect of

a secretary of defense hagel he has long severed his ties with the republican party this is and in your face nomination by the president to all of us who are supportive of israel president seems bound and determined to proceed down this path despite the fact that hagel record is very very troubling on the nation of israel now in terms of this quote anti israel stance hegel is accused of having here he is speaking on this very issue back in two thousand and six the united states will remain committed to defending israel our relationship with israel is a special and historic. but it need not and cannot be at the expense of our arab and muslim relationships. as i was actually you saying the united states has many relationships and while the one with israel is special and important we need to remember that other ones are important too now do people really disagree with this it is of course important that anyone pick to head the

department of defense be questioned vigorously about past statements and positions but when the most controversial aspect of a person one that could potentially threaten his nomination has to do with wanting to put serving the united states above serving israel i think it's worth asking what precisely our relationship with israel is what are the goals and for how much longer will voicing concerns about the relationship mean an automatic stain on your record. on isn't financial news now a bank of america has agreed to pay more than ten billion dollars to mortgage giants fannie mae to settle claims of mortgages gone bad dealing mostly with loans issued by countrywide it was all the big news today bank of america had reached a settlement with fannie mae to resolve claims related to residential mortgage loans ten point three billion is what bank of america owes fannie mae roughly seven billion in loans it will buy back to is going to pay three point six billion to

fannie mae it's going to buy back about six point seven billion in loans that it and its countrywide bank units sold to fannie mae. now in addition to that settlement today ten major u.s. banks and mortgage companies also came to an agreement today after months of back and forth haggling with federal regulators over improper actions related to foreclosures across this country we're talking about banks bought like j.p. morgan chase also bank of america wells fargo citi group and p. and c. financial services the big banks agreed to pay eight point five billion dollars to make up for widespread abuse that led to thousands of americans being forced out of their home the breakdown. in loan modifications allen says now despite settlements like this one today

another one couple years ago the foreclosure crisis is far from over and in some cases it is actually getting worse earlier today i was joined by debbie goldberg special project director with the national fair housing alliance i asked her for her take on this report. well you know this is actually a redo of an enforcement action that the fed and the controller of the currency entered into with the actually fourteen banks of which these ten are part and then there's another four that haven't signed on to this yet over a year ago now that was designed to go back and look at the loans that were in foreclosure not necessarily completed foreclosure but in some stage of foreclosure in two thousand and nine and two thousand and ten because their initial look had indicated that there were widespread problems with the way those foreclosures were handled and that those problems resulted in harm to consumers and the original action with something they called the independent foreclosure review or i.f.r.

was designed to find those people who had been harmed and compensate them for the harm that they had experience in dollar amounts that range from zero but other things being changed up to a maximum of one hundred twenty five thousand dollars but what's the takeaway here of of what happened of the settlement so the problem is that the process they were engaging in with taking way too long it was costing way too much and that has yet to result in a single payment to a single borrower and this new direction is supposed to fix that it's going to hopefully get more money into the herriman get money into the hands of our was quickly but there are a lot of big questions about the details of how it's going to work and whether that will be fair or not. i think it's a really good question i mean what do you think will it be fair or will there be certain people who will get some of this money and certain people who never will write well unfortunately we don't yet have all the details about what they've agreed to with these banks but if they're going to make it fair there are some

things that we think they need to do one is transparency we need to have the answers to these questions we need to know how it's going to be decided who is going to get money and how much money we need to know something about the geographic areas and the demographic characteristics of people who do get the money because we know foreclosures are concentrated in some communities and that there are some kinds of borrowers who are much more likely to enter into foreclosure or to be faced with foreclosure than others but we don't know whether those are the folks and those are the communities where these funds will be go and so we need to have some of those kinds of answers and then we also need to know for the part that's not going to be the direct cash payments to borrowers but rather the principal reduction and those kinds of what they're calling soft money how that's going to work and make sure that that's done in a way that's fair and equitable as well i know that you have written about this and you said recently in a press release that communities of color particularly be hit hard by abusive

mortgage practices and that they need to have equal access to the settlement money what kind of barriers that would prevent some of these communities from getting the money. well the biggest problem is that we just don't know how it's going to be distributed and what the criteria will be and. you know how how they will make those determinations and so we have for some time now been asking the fed and the controller to make public information about the geographic location and the demographic characteristics of the borrowers in this four point four million bar were pool who's part of this independent foreclosure review process but so far they've refused to do that and so unless we know who's in the eligible. relation and then who actually gets money we won't be able to tell whether it's been done in a fair way from a from a fair housing perspective and i think that's a really fair point a lot of transparency lacking so far i want to take a look at some of the hard numbers here this is according to realty trac from

january two thousand and six to october two thousand and twelve there were about ten million foreclosure starts and about half of those ended in foreclosure and as of the end of two thousand and twelve just last week really there were fourteen million homeowners whose homes were underwater what's the story behind the numbers here debbie. a lot of it is lending that should never have happened. people who were put in loans that were never intended to be sustainable or affordable over the long haul and whose loans to no surprise went belly up a lot of it is people who are kind of caught in the squeeze with declining home prices rising unemployment. a situation where people in the past would have been able to sell their home if they couldn't afford the loan payments but can't now because declining home prices mean that they owe more on their home than it's worth and when those folks hit a bump in the road financially their own able to sell their house because they

can't get enough money for it to pay the bank off so experts estimate that we're really only about halfway through this foreclosure crisis and there are potentially many more foreclosures to happen which is why this settlement if it were done right with the principal reduction that could be made available to at least this pool of borrowers could really be a help because when you reduce the loan balance what it means is that if you do it right that the borrower can then afford to make their monthly payments they can stay in that home they can keep up on that loan the bank will get its money and the neighborhood stays. more intact and that seems to be sort of what everyone should strive for a win win win situation we have a lot of arguments that you know further punishing these banks would amount to punishing all of us because really you know we rely on banks for loans they need regulatory certainty to perform the functions that we depend on them for this argument is often used by government officials when responding to questions about

why they punish these banks in the first place at least a much bigger what do you think about this argument. well it is useful for banks to have some regulatory certainty but in this case that's not the issue i mean here it's clear that banks made errors they made mistakes when they were processing these foreclosures and those mistakes resulted in significant harm to the borrowers and so this is really a cleanup action here this is less about what banks are going to do moving forward and making loans in the future we've got lots of other things going on that will affect that but this is really about looking back and trying to clean up the mistakes that the banks made in the past and do it in a way that's going to help the borrowers who suffered because of those mistakes because you know we need those borrowers in order for banks to be able to do business in order for the economy to keep moving we need those borrowers to be on stable financial ground again as well not just the banks but also the rest of us

yeah certainly i think what you're calling for them more transparency would would be a good start in terms of letting us all learn a little bit more about all of this especially who is eligible and who could be helped by this goldberg special project director at the national fair housing alliance thanks so much well one of the most outspoken influential activists who helped spur the anti g.m.o. movement has changed his mind mark linus says in fact medically modified foods are not a living pollution nor will they turn what we eat into frankenfood the reason for his change of heart he says is science i want to apologize for having spent several years ripping up jim crow and i'm also sorry that i hope start the answer to movements back in the ninety's. by assisted in demonizing an important technological option which can and should be used to benefit the environment. well as you might imagine this is spurring several others who jumped on the anti g.m.o.

train to stand their ground and to breathe new life into a very long debate so we were curious to find out more about why such a prominent outspoken critic of g.m. most has changed his mind mark linus joined us earlier from london to explain his one hundred eighty degree turn basically my change of heart comes from the fact that i spent a long time studying the science on biotechnology which was preceded by studying the sun from climate change so basically i moved from being somebody who was a writing about environmental issues from an environmentalist perspective to somebody who is trying to study the sun in order to be more effective in talking about climate change and there's a very strong consensus on climate change which comes from the scientific community and when i discovered that there was the same sort of consensus in the scientific community that jim i was with safe i basically had a debate as my views on that. we spoke about your change of heart to alexis baden meyer with the organic consumers association and i want to play for you what she

says and then have you respond there's no evidence that genetically modified food is safe to eat in the united states we don't safety tested we consider it substantially equivalent basically the same as normal food and there are no safety tests done so you're saying there's no evidence that g.m. is are not safe she's saying there's no evidence that it is safe to talk a little bit about you know how we get past this and you know if what you say is correct show the people that it is in fact safe. well what you're saying is actually not correct there's been tens of millions of dollars worth of tests done and tested on every new product that reaches the market in a year these tests are all done independently and they done by independent scientists so that's simply not true and the point is you can ask for evidence that something is. it's safe and it's very difficult to to prove a negative for the point is if we can do all of the tests and there's been testing for many years on all the different chimo products which are in the market there's never been any evidence of home so that comes

a point where you just say ok fine the jury is in the food is not frankenfood it's not scary him it was new fifteen years ago but now it's not new and actually it's complete except one completely so i guess mark what led you sort of all those years ago to make this such a huge issue it was something that you really spoke out against and really became one of the godfathers of this movement what is it that you saw or read that made you anti g.m. that first. well you have to understand this is bound up with a whole lot of cultural value stuff so most of this debate tends to use trying to demonize some of these companies like monsanto for example people are very obsessed with monsanto being this kind of demonic presence on the corporate stage and a lot of the anti capitalist type protesters you see the gym most think it's really part of the main battle against big corporations so a lot of this is very violence based stuff the organic lobby of course is very anti g.m.o. because they believe it's a natural so the whole lot of stuff all wrapped up in here with

a very deep seated level and it's not going to be easy to to reframe that but again if you come at this from a scientific spectrum and you look at the evidence there really isn't any evidence of coal that we've got anything to worry about and in fact these are potentially very useful technologies which we can use to help the environment and that's something which is really really changed my mind so what about those people margo who you know worry that you've actually just arranged you know a behind the scenes deal with monsanto that they're paying you to be their new spokesperson their all the all powerful monsanto you can assure us that you have been paid off right. in my my payment for giving that speech was like they gave me a glass you know one of those things that you get when you're a speaker and the charm of the conference has given me a ram which is the top of which is the shape medal shape because it was on the road as a farm just up the road and i keep sheep as well but other than that i've not heard anything for months on so well the biotechnology industry in general and if they contact me i would tell them to go away i'm not interested. and i know let's get into a little science here i know this is confusing to

a lot of people but i know one of the things that you've said in the past is that g.m. is actually just another form of mutation breeding but doesn't retention breeding sort of bring about its own set of problems. well what you're talking about is the technique of need to genesis which is in juicing mutations and in plants and all of that to get them to develop traits which you then find desirable an example is that the weight which is thought which is used in past or during weight was used was spread through me genesis a long time ago and it's something which has been accepted for a long time but the point is that g.m. is actually much more precise because you identify the genes that you want and you put them into the plant and you and you check it very carefully for safety and so on and so forth with new genesis and standard conventional plant breeding which that when excess including organic farmers. basically messed up the whole genome and just see what happens there is no safety testing at all so actually i think you can make a strong case that g.m. foods are probably safer than their conventional counterparts do you think you're going to have a quite a few people kind of following you in this new opinion i mean what i have people's

reaction been. well it's been fascinating actually i was expecting a you know bag full of hate mail but i'm just been after me there's been one or two of the standard accusation article which i get money from monsanto but i would say that's been out weighed one hundred times by a court of tweets e-mails and just a number of times that thing's been downloaded it's probably tracking about one hundred forty thousand times now in just a few days and you know that's a kind of viral internet phenomenon which i had no idea i just wrote a speech and i gave a speech and put up a blog post but you know this is actually struck a chord with a lot of people but sort of over also realizing in a similar vein it's worry that there's simply nothing behind all these german fears and it's time to get on with using the science properly well it certainly is an interesting debate that as you say it's been going on for years still to know and appreciate you sharing your views my client is environmental campaigner and author of the god species and the like. so i had here on r.t.e.

a federal judge rules against putting mentally unstable prisoners in solitary confinement the reasoning in that case coming up next. here is mitt romney trying to figure out a lot of that saying that the americans call. on the

guy you. used. the word. it's my terror cells he doesn't want to mislead the future isn't the only liberal the christian. can secure the support of the snow super to distract us from what you and i should care about because they're profit driven industry that sells us sensationalistic garbage he calls it breaking news i'm happy martin and we're going to break this that it's. not just burn your eyes right i mean it's like a derivative of actual pepper it's a food product essentially. up this much stronger than anything you'd be biopsied. thousands of times were stronger than any going to the body of

a butcher you know. let me let me i want it all let me ask you a question. here on this network is what we have in the bank we have our knives out. but the truth is this time it was a bad thing there again we're in a situation where b.

and i don't agree to talk about theory let me. the world.

there are some changes ahead for mentally ill prisoners in this country and two states so far taking steps to keep these inmates out of solitary confinement now in california the department of corrections has already prepped more than fifty prisoners to move out of solitary and into the general population and in indiana a federal judge has ruled that the department of corrections in that state violated prisoners eighth amendment rights by not providing adequate mental health care by subjecting them to solitary confinement and in many cases worsening their illness earlier today i was joined by bonnie kernis with the american friends services committee she's also a director of the prison watch project and i asked her to talk a little bit about the outcome of this case and what this all means on a larger scale. well the issue of isolation is something that the american friends service committee has been monitoring in u.s. prisons since one thousand nine hundred eighty six. we first saw political people

political activists jailhouse lawyer. islamic militants put in isolation and then in the ninety they began building holes supermax prisons to hold the mentally ill who had been released to the streets with the closing of the federal hospitals. so this is this is a huge thing for activists for prisoners for family members. the news of solitary confinement for mentally ill prisoners is something you can't give me a good reason for yeah it's really interesting because when when using solitary a lot of these department of corrections say it's either used to try to get more information out of these people who are willing to do so when they're in the general population or it's used to keep quote unquote dangerous prisoners away from

other ones talk a little bit about these arguments and how. truthful they are when we're talking about solitary and its use in the well that's that's the argument that the department of corrections gives us. when you know when i hear from people in draping utah or tam's illinois which also just closed. it is from people who are saying i am mentally ill and i have that mentally ill and i'm not being treated. as some of the conditions of confinement are so awful but they come down with skin rashes they start cutting themselves other conditions are so clean that they're in concrete boxes. completely isolated they can't hear it's cold it's cold no touch torture. and it's a technique that the united states uses not just in u.s. prisons but it also uses in prisons open. a garage band and ghraib and

guantanamo bay. that's interesting that you brought that up because military prisons as well and here at r.t. we talk a lot about private first class bradley manning who is accused of leaking classified documents to the whistle blowing web site wiki leaks and this is a person who certainly you cannot use the you know dangerous prisoner argument on this is a five foot two or five foot three young man. and he was in solitary confinement for eight months before being moved into a different military prison talk a little bit about bonny solitary in general in this country and just how it's come to this point where it's used an overused. it's used in overused i think it was an experiment that started with my generation of activists when they found themselves in prison the sixty's the seventy's even the a.p. they will put in solitary confinement. it was an experiment that worked well

enough so that the formants of corrections throughout the country began building with federal dollars. supermax prisons. bradley manning. has brought one out and scott bauer the young man and his wife were kept in iranian. solitary confinement have brought tremendous publicity to the use but it is used all over the country it's used for mentally ill it's also used politically or. young black gang members it's use the federal government has what they call communication management units where if you're islamic you're going to be put in a small group isolation you're not going to be allowed out in general population

well it certainly is interesting and just real briefly we're almost out of time but what will the challenges be indiana and california certainly a start but there are forty eight other states you know they use this method what's the biggest challenge to getting all fifty states from making changes for people to understand that there is no good reason for extended isolation there just isn't happening all right bonnie harness that with the american friends services committee and also the director of the prison want to project appreciate you being with us this is a topic we really try to focus on and stay on top of what's going on with us around the country thank you. well that is going to do it for now but if you missed any part of today's show your luck we post all of our interviews online in full just go to youtube dot com slash r t america and for the latest information on the stories we covered today in a few we didn't have time to get to check out our web site r.t. dot com.